An empirical exploration of factors that facilitate priming
in young children was undertaken utilizing sequentially
degraded pictures (fragpix) developed by Snodgrass and her
colleagues. The identification of fragmented pictures was
studied by 288 children across four experiments. In the
first two experiments abbreviated sets of fragpix were
generated for use with young children. Experiments 3 and 4
manipulated five attributes of the priming stimulus to
measure their effect on direct and indirect tests of memory.
Experiment 3 was a scaling study that delineated age associated
identification thresholds for fragpix. It also
examined hypotheses regarding the impact of prior exposure
and perceptual closure on indirect and direct tests of
memory. During the exposure and test condition, 3-, 4-, 5-
and 8-year olds were shown fragpix in descending degrees of
fragmentation until they correctly named the picture.
Snodgrass proposed perceptual closure as an explanatory
mechanism for identification of incomplete pictures. To
explore this hypothesis, following identification of each
fragpic, half the children were shown the completed picture.
This manipulation had no facilitative effect on
identification or recall of fragmented pictures. Two
measures of prior exposure, priming and transfer, were also
computed. Age differences were found on picture
identification, free recall, and picture recognition
measures of discrimination and response bias. A linear
trend was revealed on measures of priming for picture
identification, and for picture recognition but
not for recall.
A similar method was used for each of the first three
experiments: Fragpix were presented in their most degraded
form with pictorial information systematically added until
the picture was named. Snodgrass and Feenan (1990)
suggested that priming might be equally effective if only
single levels of fragmentation were presented. They
reported that exposing adults to moderately fragmented
pictures promoted closure and was more beneficial for later
identification, than exposure to maximally-fragmented or
nearly completed pictures. Experiment 4 tested this
"optimal level" hypothesis with 5- and 8-year olds. Scores
from Experiment 3 were used to select age-specific levels of
fragmentation that made fragpix easy, moderately easy, or
difficult to identify.
Attributes of the priming stimulus were manipulated in
Experiment 4 to examine the differential impact of varying
exposure conditions on performance and on the magnitude of
priming. Three manipulations occurred: One varied number of
stimulus changes across levels of fragmentation, a second
varied order of difficulty, and a third varied the nature of
stimulus change (random or systematic). Manipulating the
priming stimulus influenced fragpix identification and
priming, but had little definitive impact on free recall.
For both ages stimuli presented in a systematic rather
than random order facilitated picture identification and the
magnitude of priming. In addition, developmental
differences emerged among systematic orders of presentation.
Five-year-olds demonstrated optimal performance in picture
identification and measures of picture recognition when
there were multiple changes in temporal contrast, while
order of difficulty (moderate to easy to hard) was more
facilitative for 8-year-olds. A finding for a quadratic
function for 8-year-olds on picture identification and
magnitude of priming supported a moderately fragmented
stimulus being an optimal prime, while for 5-year-olds, the
relationship was monotonic. This pattern was not observed
on the direct memory tests.
It is argued that both perceptual and cognitive
components of the task influence performance in an
integrative manner on indirect and direct memory tests. A
modified form of transfer appropriate processing is proposed
as a reasonable explanation of the findings. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/9855 |
| Date | 02 August 2018 |
| Creators | Gonzales, Valerie Anne |
| Contributors | May, Richard B. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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